The present invention relates to an electric oven for the continuous baking of pizzas previously placed in tins, the oven being of the kind having a baking chamber provided with heater means, a continuously-driven conveyor for conveying, in succession, through the said baking chamber, a number of pizzas placed in respective baking tins, the conveyor being accessible from an area outside the baking chamber for the loading of pizzas to be baked, and for the unloading of baked pizzas.
In order to carry out continuous production, in ovens of the aforesaid kind, of pizzas of a quality and aroma comparable with pizzas of the traditional type, it is necessary to select accurately suitable interdependent values of the oven temperature and humidity, and the time spent by each pizza in the oven, according to the weight and size of each pizza to be baked and the nature of the ingredients of the pizza.
The electric ovens hitherto widely used for the continuous baking of pizzas are basically of the rectilinear tunnel kind. Such tunnel ovens suffer from recognized disadvantages both of a technical and economic nature. Firstly, an obvious disadvantage is the relatively large size of such ovens even when, for example, only low or medium production yields are required, since the size of the ovens restricts the space available for easy access to the opposite ends of the oven for the efficient loading and unloading of the pizzas. Another considerable disadvantage of this kind of oven is the relative difficulty of satisfactory control of the oven temperature and humidity, without recourse to the use of expensive monitoring and adjusting devices of these parameters. Yet another disadvantage is the size of the baking space, which must necessarily be large for the uniform heating of the oven to the desired working temperature, necessitating a predetermined, non-negligible power consumption.
The main object of the present invention is to provide an electric oven for the continuous production of pizzas in baking tins, with structural and functional characteristics such as to overcome the aforementioned disadvantages of previously known rectilinear ovens.